Anthony Davis is already viewed by many as being one of the top few players in the league today, a dominant big man that has the ability to impact the game on both ends of the floor at an absolutely frightening rate.
And the new head coach of the Pelicans, Alvin Gentry, wants to make him even more difficult to deal with by extending his range to the three-point arc.
From John Reid of NOLA.com:In a conference call to season-ticket holders on Tuesday night, Gentry says he has already told Davis that every day he works out in the gym this upcoming season he wants him to make 150 corner 3-point shots from each side of the court.
''That’s got to become a consistent shot for him,’' Gentry said. ''I don’t think he’s going to have any problem doing it. If you go back and look at his high school days, he was a very good 3-point shooter. But all of sudden he decided to grow six or eight inches. He still has that range, but I don’t think it has been incorporated in the offense in college or the pros that he’s been in.
''We want him to shoot that shot. So I think you probably see him make more 3s than he’s made his entire career.’'
Gentry has had success doing this in the past. As head coach of the Suns in 2010, he got Channing Frye to launch 392 three-pointers, after he had made just 20 in total during his first four NBA seasons. Frye shot 43.9 percent from three-point distance that season.
Davis made only one three-pointer last season on 12 attempts, but it turned out to be the difference in sending New Orleans to the playoffs because it ultimately gave them the tie-breaker over the Thunder in the standings.
Davis is already unstoppable on the offensive end of the floor, so adding yet another weapon to his arsenal seems almost unfair to the rest of the league. With Gentry looking to create even more of a monster here, a famous quote from the Bhagavad Gita delivered by one of the men who invented the atomic bomb comes to mind: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
